Onion Peels

They sit on my tongue like coarse gravel, and biting down on them irks my teeth. Even handling them, with their crunchy brown shells on top of slimy white layers, gives me a teeny case of the shivers.

That’s why I couldn’t help but let out a groan when, on the first Tuesday of Year Course, our bus came to a stop at an onion farm. The volunteer coordinator got on the bus and then told us that we would spend our day picking onions for the underprivileged, so that they could have food for Rosh Hashana.

Charitable, but gross.

The coordinator from M’Shulchan L’Shulchan (Table to Table) told us that there were two things of utmost importance that day: we were not to eat any onions, and we were, under no circumstances, allowed to throw them.

At the time, both requests seemed fairly reasonable to me.

For the first half hour, all I could do was grunt.

And groan.

And whine.

The sun was getting higher and the fields were getting hotter, and I had to bend over to pick up individual onions, and then they had to be carried in a milk crate to bigger milk crates a long way away, and they were smelly and I was getting sweaty, and it was early, and I didn’t wanna.

And then, as I bent over to pick up another onion, I heard something whiz by my ear and felt my hat plop off my head.

I looked up, across the field, to one of my friends grinning and running towards the central onion receptacle.

Like wildfire across an onion field, people began throwing onions left and right at friends and awkward first-week acquaintances alike. With the volunteering coordinator long gone, a plethora of onions, and the free shirts already handed out, there was nothing to stop people from going nuts.

When throwing onions (quickly) got old, we gathered around and replaced words in various book titles with the word “onion”.

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Onion”. “The Old Man and the Onion”. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Onion”. Of course, once we ran out of books, we moved over to songs. “Every time we touch, I get this onion”. “I kissed an onion (and I liked it)”. “Apple-bottom onions”.

By the late afternoon, we were singing about how nobody could read our on-on-on-onion face on-on-onion faces.

At one point, one of my friends stacked up several milk crates in order to deposit his onions on top of a stack, only to have the crates totter out from beneath him. He collapsed into a pile of onions and the whole field of people could not stop laughing.

It's two years later now, and that day is still one of my best memories from Year Course.

Lots of things, both during my time in Israel and in life in general, start out rough and then end in joy.

In some ways, that’s the story of the Jewish people. More than teaching me to expect things to get better, though, my experience in Israel taught me how to appreciate the rough parts of things.

Even the start of the day, despite my moaning, had its own inherent value.

Throughout the course of my year, I grew to love and appreciate the jagged edges Israel quite clearly has.